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Comment by max_ | Hacker News Reader

Having to make a repo bare to not have issues with branches is definitely obscure.

It's obvious as soon as you consider that your push will overwrite a ref that's currently checked out in the target's repo workdir. The exact same thing happens when pushing to local repos. You don't have to make a repo bare to avoid this issue, but it's certainly the easiest way to avoid it altogether when you don't need a workdir on the server side.

It's obvious that it needs to update the ref. It's not obvious that this would cause any problems. You could fix HEAD as part of writing the ref. Automatically managing HEAD is normal git behavior.

It's obvious that something non-obvious would have to happen with the workdir behind the user's back. Imagine that you are working with your workdir while someone else pushes something to your repo. Bailing out is the only sane option (unless something else has been explicitly requested by the user).

Nothing has to happen to the workdir if you fix HEAD.

...except of all the things that rely on the HEAD pointing to another ref now changing their behavior. gbp will by default bail off if HEAD is not on a branch, "git commit" won't update the ref you thought it will cause you're now suddenly on "detached HEAD" etc.

I've never heard of... debian package builder? I don't care if it gets annoyed; if that's one of the biggest issues then that's a good sign for the method.

Yes the commit won't be on the branch you want, but you'd get about the same issue if the two repos had a bare upstream. The branch diverges and you need to merge. It's a bit less ergonomic here but could be improved. Git could use branch following improvements in general.

> Yes the commit won't be on the branch you want, but you'd get about the same issue if the two repos had a bare upstream.

Not at all. The commit would have "landed" on the exact branch you thought it will. How it will be reconciled with a diverged remote branch is completely orthogonal and may not even be of concern in some use cases at all.

The situation is almost identical except you don't have a cute name for your new commit. Let's say you add a ref to your detached commit, perhaps local/foo. Then you're looking at a divergence between foo and local/foo. If you had a bare upstream it would be a divergence between origin/foo and foo. No real difference. And if you don't want to reconcile then you don't have to.

If git was a tiny bit smarter it could remember you were working on "foo" even after the ref changes.

Of course it could, but that doesn't yet mean it should. A checked-out ref is considered to be in-use and not to be manipulated (unless done in tandem with HEAD), not just by "git push" but also other tools like "git branch". It's consistent and, IMO, less surprising than what you propose. It could be an optional behavior configured by receive.denyCurrentBranch, though I don't see a good use-case for it that isn't already handled by updateInstead.

If someone pushes to a repo you should expect the refs to change. In some sense doing nothing avoids surprise but it's a bad way to avoid surprise.

But my real point is that refusing to act is not "the only sane [default] option" here. Mild ergonomic issues aren't a disqualifier.

If you use "git branch -d" you should expect the ref to be deleted, and yet:

> error: cannot delete branch 'main' used by worktree at '/tmp/git'

You could build the system differently and what seems like a sane default would be different there, but it would be a different system. In this system, HEAD isn't being manipulated by things not meant to manipulate it.

It wasn't obscure before GitHub.

Still, I like the online browser, and pr workflow.

Yeah this is the best arguments for GitHub type of web git GUI. Not knowing bare repo seems just like a devs not reading docs. And I'm sorry in this day and age devs needs to keep up and just type git like curl http://...../install.sh type of thing.

However would NEVER trust Github since the MS acquisition. codeberg and https://forgejo.org are perfectly sound FOSS alternative to GitHub and GigLabs nowdays.

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